Did a girl get pregnant after male ejaculated into swimming pool? Fact Check
Long running urban legends tell the story of a teenage girl (or more than one, depending on what version you read) that became impregnated after frequenting a swimming pool in which a male had just ejaculated.
FALSE
Rumours about females becoming impregnated after swimming in ejaculate-infested swimming pools have been doing the rounds for decades, with its earliest versions even pre-dating the Internet. Such rumours are frequently amalgamated with further claims that impregnated victims have successfully sued those who operate such swimming pools under various decrees such as “unlawful impregnation” and so forth.
Despite the persistency of this bona-fide urban legend, it’s just simply untrue. While history has shown us that few have tried (and subsequently failed) to “float” such a story, the mathematics just doesn’t add up.
This legend fails on one simple premise; it’s just too difficult for tiny sperm to locate, travel and impregnate a nubile female in the comparatively vast and hostile environment of a swimming pool.
Swimming pools are hostile environments.
Sperm can live up to many hours outside of the human body, it’s true. But only in optimal conditions. And swimming pools do not provide optimal conditions. On the contrary, pools are extremely hostile to delicate sperm cells. The water in swimming pools is typically treated with chemicals to keep it clear and clean, and the temperature is far too warm for sperm.
This means in the open water of a pool, sperm will only likely live up to a few minutes before perishing.
Sperm is really, really slow.
Well, technically, sperm is really fast, given its size. However, in terms of quickness that we’re more familiar with, it’s really slow. The initial force of the ejaculate is around 10 miles per hour (outside of water) and once that quickly dissipates, sperm can travel a mere 15-20cm per hour. Given that sperm would have long perished before that hour, even optimistic predictions wouldn’t place sperm travelling more than a handful of centimetres before their time is up.
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Obstacles
Condoms and other forms of contraception work because sperm cannot travel “through walls”. And a swimsuit and closed labia provide a pretty good defense against “stray” sperm. And only then would it have to embark on the hostile environment of the vagina.
Sperm doesn’t have good navigation
For reasons on which we won’t speculate, many believe sperm have fantastic “homing” beacons to ensure it is travelling in the right direction, like a shark detecting blood in the ocean. But it’s just not true. Sperm do have receptors that can aid in locating the ovum, but these only work when the sperm is already really close to the ovum (as in, a few millimetres.) In the open water of swimming pool, sperm has no idea where it’s going (and not very far, as we pointed out above!)
Women are not always fertile
Given the previous points, this one is practically irrelevant anyway, but it is perhaps worth noting that women are only fertile for around 25% of their menstrual cycle, meaning if a sperm did manage to foil all the previous points (which is already nigh impossible) it would still only have a comparatively small chance of impregnating a female.
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Of course as we alluded to above, some have tried to float this explanation. The legend was given a new lease of life in 2009 when a woman named Magdalena Kwiatkowska announced she was to sue a hotel in Egypt because her 13 year old girl fell pregnant after frequenting the swimming pool there. But our history is littered with somewhat outlandish explanations for falling pregnant that perhaps should be taken with a pinch of salt, ranging from alien abductions to “I tripped and fell”.
This legend was spreading again in 2016 when spoof news site WorldNewsDailyReport.com published a headline claiming a boy managed to impregnate 16 girls at a birthday party after ejaculating into the swimming pool. Needless to say, that didn’t happen either.
This is all to say, it is essentially impossible for someone to fall pregnant while frequenting a swimming pool in which someone has ejaculated. Humans have penetrative sex for a reason – conceiving is already hard enough and penetrative sex provides the best chance of becoming pregnant. It is simply unrealistic to add so many more obstacles to an already arduous trek for sperm and expect the same outcome, impregnation. It’s just not going to happen.